The other Marseilles

For over 25 years, immigrants and their descendants, now into their fourth generation, have been segregated in the northern quarter of Marseilles, and discriminated against. The area is being renovated, but that won’t change much

The north of Marseilles (the quartiers nord) is an area of oddly named low-income low-rent council estates, inside the city but cordoned off from it as though in quarantine. When I first went there in 1987, I met a man who told me: “I’ve got two countries, France and Algeria, here and there. But mine’s the one I prefer.” Caught between two cultures, he was from the much talked about second generation of immigrants, and his family, like so many North African families in Marseilles, had been moved from shanty-towns to temporary housing to the dilapidated council estate where he still lives.

Twenty-five years later, those housing blocks, in straight rows or squares, have hardly changed, except that an urban jungle has sprung up around them, with highways and junctions. At first sight the estates seem a bit less run down, a block demolished here and another rebuilt there, the buildings a little less tightly packed together, some renovated. But closer up, the stairwells still echo noisily, the facades are shabby, the balconies rusty and the shops closed down. There is the same shouting, laughter and chatter, but we’re not talking about the second generation any more: the third and fourth generations have now followed in these “suburbs within the city”.

“We [earlier generations] still have that culture of returning home, taking off our day clothes and putting on the gandoura,” said Fatima Mostefaoui, who chairs the residents’ association at the Les Flamants estate. “But they [the newer generations] don’t, they’re really French. How can anyone say they are different?” And yet, as Karima Berriche, director of Agora social centre pointed out, “they [the French] still talk about beurs [second generation] and immigrants, they still treat us like foreigners”. Perhaps that is because grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren mostly live in the same neighbourhoods, which identify them.

In the 1980s two local newspapers competed with racist headlines (“Young (...)

(1) On 15 October 1983 a small group of young beurs left Marseilles to draw attention to the violence and racism against immigrants. By the time they reached Paris on 3 December their numbers had grown to 100,000 making the event an important change in perceptions of immigration.